Via Politico: Exclusive: White House privately plots 2023 campaign run.
While this is news, after a fashion, the language of the headline (“Exclusive” “privately” and “plots”) makes it sounds rather dramatic. I would question the exclusivity of the story, as I heard something similar on ABC’s This Week on Sunday.
And one would expect that the moves would be private, and while plotting may be an an accurate verb, it has a dramatic/almost sinister connotation.
Based on information in the story, this is not all that unusual:
Even though the planning is still very preliminary, the campaign is likely to launch in just over a year. President Bill Clinton opened his second presidential campaign in the March after his first midterm congressional elections, and President George W. Bush opened Bush-Cheney ‘04 a month later in the political cycle.
If those campaigns launched in the third years of the terms in question, the planning for the launch must have taken place in the second year. Goodness knows that our election campaign are insanely long (and continue to get longer).
After posting this, I see that James Joyner treats the story appropriately.
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February 24th, 2023 at 1:48 pm
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February 24th, 2023 at 5:17 pm
Now, I’m not a pundit, but it seems to me that if we look at the 2023 election, it seems like most of the candidates announced they were running in January or February of 2023, with the earliest announcements coming in December of 2023. That would imply that if Obama were to not run, then other Democratic candidates would be announcing in December 2023 or January-February 2023. So we’d naturally expect an announcement before February 2023. How far back do we have to go to find a President who didn’t seek more than 4 years? Literally Rutherford B. Hayes, in 1880*. So we’d naturally expect Obama to announce he’s seeking reelection. Nothing to see here, move along.
* - Truman (1952), Coolidge (1928), and Teddy Roosevelt (1908) all served 1.5 terms (TR ran again in 1912), Lyndon Johnson (1968) and Chester A. Arthur (1884) sought reelection and lost their primaries.
February 24th, 2023 at 6:49 pm
Obama, running for President? Whoa! This is the shocker of the DAY!!!
February 25th, 2023 at 6:53 am
I visited the James Joyner URL. Thanks for the link!!
Indeed this is not unusual.
This is Joshua from Israeli Uncensored News
February 28th, 2023 at 3:21 pm
[...] Obama insidiously plots his 2023 takeover of the White House. (PoliBlog) [...]